“Anyut, tell me,” she says. “What’s the point of the blinchiki? Filling dough with more dough!”
I blink blearily. Ah, the mysteries of the czarist stomach. “Maybe excess is the point?” I suggest meekly.
Mom shrugs. She goes ahead and arranges the filling and its anti-mush blinchiki into a majestic bulk. Not quite a Testov-style skyscraper, but a fine structure indeed. We decorate the pie together with fanciful cut-out designs before popping it into the oven. I’m proud of Mom. As we fan ourselves, our hearts race in anticipation, much like they did for our encounter decades ago with that true kulebiaka chez White Russian émigrés.
But the botvinya still hangs over me like a sword of doom.
A huge summer hit at Giliarovsky’s Moscow traktirs, this chilled kvass and fish potage—a weird hybrid of soup, beverage, fish dish, and salad—confounded most foreigners who encountered it. “Horrible mélange! Chaos of indigestion!” pronounced All the Year Round, Charles Dickens’s Victorian periodical. Me, I’m a foreigner to botvinya myself. On the evening’s table I set out a soup tureen filled with my homemade kvass and cooked greens (botva means vegetable tops), spiked with a horseradish sauce. Beside it, serving bowls of diced cucumbers, scallions, and dill. In the middle: a festive platter with poached salmon and shrimp (my stand-in for Slavic crayfish tails). You eat the botvinya by mixing all the elements in your soup bowl—to which you add, please, ice. A Gift to Young Housewives also recommends a splash of chilled champagne. Ah yes, booze! To drown out the promised “chaos of indigestion,” I’ll pour my horseradish vodka.
“Fish and kvass?” says my mother. “Foo.” (Russian for eek.)
“Aga (Yeah),” I agree.
“Foo,” she insists. “ ’Cause you know how I hate poached salmon.”
Mom harbors a competitive streak in the kitchen. I get the feeling she secretly wants my botvinya to fail.
“You’ve made what? A real botvinya? Homemade kvass?”
Our first guests, Sasha and Ira Genis, eyeball Mom’s table, incredulous. Mom hands them the welcome kalach, a traditional bread shaped like a purse. Their eyes grow wider.
Sasha (the diminutive of Alexander) is a freewheeling émigré essayist and cultural critic, something of a legend in Russia, where his radio broadcasts are adored by millions. He’s a serious gourmet, too. Dinners at the Genis home in New Jersey feature mushrooms gathered under a Siberian moon and smoked lamprey eels smuggled from Latvia.
Mom’s face blossoms with pride as Sasha confesses that, in his whole life, he’s never tasted botvinya and tiered kulebiaka.
“And Guriev kasha?” he cries. “Does it really exist outside literature?”
Suddenly all the guests are here, crowding Mom’s tiny foyer, kissing hello three times, handing over bouquets and bottles. At table, we are: a documentary filmmaker, Andrei, and his wife, Toma, sexy in her slinky, low-cut cocktail frock; my South African–born partner, Barry; and “distinguished American guests”—a couple from Brooklyn, both in the culture business.
“A proper fin-de-siècle traktir setting,” Mom expounds to the Brooklynites in her museum-docent tones, “should be a blend of art nouveau and Russian folkloric.” The Brooklynites nod respectfully.
Zakuski devoured, first vodkas downed, everyone addresses my botvinya. Mom barely touches hers, wrinkling her nose at the salmon. I both like the botvinya and don’t: it tastes utterly alien.
And then, gasp, Mom carries out her kulebiaka. A choral whoop goes up. She cuts into the layers, releasing fishy, mushroomy steam into the candlelight. Slowly, bite by bite, I savor the voluptuousness of the dough-upon-dough Slavic excess. The fluffy layers put me in the mind of luxurious Oblomovian sloth, of collapsing into a huge feather bed. I think I finally get the point of the blinchiki. They’re like marbling in a steak.
Sasha Genis raises his vodka glass to Larisa. “This is the most patriotic meal of my life!” he enthuses. “Putin should be taking note!”
His toast puzzles me. More, it perplexes, touching on what I’ve been turning over in my mind. Patriotic about what? The hated czarist regime? The repressive State we fled decades ago? Or some collective ur-memory of a cuisine never rightfully ours? Back in the USSR, patriotism was a dirty word in our dissident circles. And for that matter, what of our supposed Russianness? At table we’re a typical pan-Soviet émigré crew. Andrei is a Ukrainian Jew; his wife, Toma, is Russian; both are from Kiev. Although the Genises hail from Riga, they’re not Latvian. Mom, also Jewish, was born in Odessa and lived in Murmansk and Leningrad before moving to Moscow. I’m the only born Muscovite among us.
My ruminations on patriotism are drowned out by more toasts. Mom’s air conditioner chugs and strains; the toasts grow more ironic, more Soviet, more “ours” …
What was going on in the Russia we’re bidding adieu to here, in the year 1910? our Brooklyn culturati are asking. “Well, Chekhov has been dead for six years,” answers Sasha. “Tolstoy has just died at a remote railway station.”
“His strange death a major cultural milestone,” Mother chimes in, not to be outdone. “It caused a massive media frenzy.”
In 1913, I add myself, revisiting my patriotism theme, the tone-deaf Czar Nicholas II created a minor public relations disaster by serving a Frenchified menu at the banquet celebrating three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty. Potage a tortue—definitely not patriotic.
Cautiously I dig my spoon now into my Guriev kasha. Rich yet light, with a texture somewhere between pudding and torte, it tastes like a celestial version of my dreaded kindergarten breakfast farina. The guests giggle at my three a.m. penki fiasco.
And then it’s suddenly time for au revoirs. To Mom, to me, to czarist excess. The Genises head off down the hallway to the elevator. Suddenly Sasha comes running back.
“Devochki (Girls)! The kulebiaka, I just have to say again: wow! Inserting blini into yeast pastry!? Unreal.”
Maybe I do understand Sasha’s brand of patriotism and nostalgia. It’s patriotism for that nineteenth-century Russian idea of Culture with a capital C—an idea, and an ideal, that we ex-Soviets from Ukraine and Moscow and Latvia have never abandoned. They still stir us, those memories of savoring orgiastic descriptions of edibles in Chekhov and Gogol while dunking stale socialist pies into penitentiary-style soups.
I want to ask Mom what she thinks of all this, but she looks too exhausted. And sweaty. I have a feeling she’s welcoming the seven and a half decades of frugal Soviet eating ahead of us.
CHAPTER TWO
1920s: LENIN’S CAKE
When I was four, I developed a troubling fascination with Lenin. With Dedushka (Grandpa) Lenin, as the leader of the world proletariat was known to us Soviet kids.
For a grandfather, Vladimir Ilyich was distressingly odd. I puzzled over how he could be immortal—“more alive than all the living,” per Mayakovsky—and yet be so clearly, blatantly dead. Puzzling too how Lenin was simultaneously the curly-haired baby Volodya on the star-shaped Octobrists badge of first-graders and yet a very old dedushka with a tufty triangular beard, unpleasantly bald under his inescapable flat cap. Everyone raved about how honest he was, how smart and courageous; how his revolution saved Russia from backwardness. But doubts nagged at me. That cheesy proletarian cap (who ever wore such a thing?) and that perpetual sly squint, just a bit smirky—they made him not entirely trustworthy. And how come alkogoliks sometimes kicked his stony statues, mumbling “Fucking syphilitic”? And what awesome revolutionary, even if bald, would marry Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who resembled a misshapen tea cozy?